January 18, 2007

People of color

I want to confess to a straightforward idiosyncratic personal
linguistic preference — an aesthetic judgment, if you want to call
it that. At the end I draw out a lesson from it. The confession is this:
I simply hate the term person of color (along with its
standard pluralization, people of color). I have never used it,
and I never will. They can't make me. Fifteen years ago I was a
graduate dean, running an affirmative action program and making speeches
on the topic, and I didn't use the phrase then. I happen to be a firm
defender of affirmative action legislation; and back then all
administrators used the phrase as a badge of having the right attitudes
concerning ethnic diversity, even if they were privately skeptical about
affirmative action. But although I walked the walk, I wouldn't talk the
talk. I didn't refer to African Americans and Chicanos and
Latinos and
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as "people of color", and I still won't.

This is a linguistic dislike I'm expressing,
and it's not much easier to convincingly
justify (though I will supply a little reasoning below)
than any taste judgment in music or art. You may dislike split
infinitives, in which case you will have winced at the foregoing sentence;
I dislike person of color and people of color.

I speculate (unverified empirical claim coming up) that most other
people who dislike or avoid using the phrase person of color are
negatively disposed toward the aims and ideals of political movements
focused on rights of ethnic minorities. They refuse to go along with
terminological innovations that they scornfully associated with "political
correctness". That, as it happens, is not to be the case with me. I
have exactly the sort of attitudes that the haters of "political
correctness" generally despise. I not only believe in legislative and
social action to ensure rights for ethnic and racial minorities, I also
fully accept the right of ethnic and racial groups to decide how they
would like to be referred to. Except in the case of this particular
phrase, which I happen to I hate.

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to note that if my life involved
interaction with Yup'ik or Inuit people, I would probably use those terms
when talking to or about them and their people, rather than calling them
"Eskimos", if they didn't like the latter word.
("Eskimo" has often been
said to have an insulting etymology involving a
word meaning "eater of raw flesh" in some Athabaskan Indian
language.
That
turns
out to be a myth: the
real source word means something like "snowshoe weaver"
[thanks to Jesse Sheidlower on this point].)
I do in fact use the word
Eskimo (and occasionally get criticized for it),
but my uses of it are either references to the Eskimo branch
of the Eskimo-Aleut language family, where the word is a technical term
in English as used in comparative linguistics, or else they are
repetitions of those hundreds or thousands of people who have
asserted that the "Eskimos" have many / dozens / scores / hundreds
of words for snow. They never know which exact language they are
talking about, so
in that context we are talking about all the indigenous Greenlandic,
Arctic Quebecois Inukttitut, Central Canadian Inuit, Alaskan Inuit,
Alaskan Yup'ik, and Siberian Yup'ik peoples; restricting to one of
those would
make no sense. But I definitely accept that if the indigenous people of
Greenland want to be called Greenland Inuit rather than Greenland Eskimos,
that is their right, just as it is their right to have Greenland called
Kalaallit Nunaat, and to have the former Godthåb called Nuuk. My
point is that I don't use Eskimo because of a dislike of the words
Yup'ik or Inuit; I use it as
a technical term in language family classification.

In the past four decades I have willingly shifted from using "negro"
to using "colored" to using "black" (or later "Black") to using
"Afro-American" to using "African American", all for the single ethnic
group that the conservative British linguist Geoffrey Sampson has
(astonishingly) carried on calling "negroes" throughout four decades.

Generally people with political views like mine (positive about people
of other ethnicities and strongly negative about racism) unhesitatingly
use the term people of color, especially in public pronouncements.
But I don't and won't.

To the extent that I can do anything to provide rational argumentation
to support my dislike of the term, I would say that its semantic looseness
is one problem. The phrase seems to function more as a badge of political
progressiveness and racial tolerance than anything else; but to me it
seems like an unwholesome capitulation to the old apartheid idea that
there really is some meaningful division between people who are white and
people who are not — it seems to presuppose and endorse the stupid
idea that there really is some way of determining whether some random
Armenian or Azerbaijani or Albanian or Afghan or Argentinian or Ainu or
part-Aboriginal Australian is or is not a legitimate claimant to the label
"person of color". I genuinely think it is nonsense to true and draw
such a line. At one time under apartheid, South African law treated
Chinese (who didn't have a lot of economic clout back then) as non-white,
but Japanese (increasingly important to the economy) as white. Gives the
whole game away, doesn't it? I say that hunting for the line between
those who are white and those who are not is a fool's game.

Even setting this aside (after all, there are many other highly
vague predicates), the quasi-archaic syntactic weirdness of the phrase
makes my teeth itch. The phrase seems mincingly awkward to me in syntactic
terms. The idea is to have a syntactic work-around so that the notion of
not having pale pink-colored skin can be expressed without any appearance
of going back to the 1960s uses of "colored". So colored person
is replace by person of color. But there is no regular process
that yields the pattern person of X for X-ed
person: if you try the same thing with other -ed
adjectives it sounds utterly insane: you can't refer to someone who is
freckled as a person of freckles, or a person who is dazed as a person
of daze. Batman, the caped crusader, is not a person of cape.
[Update: Coby Lubliner tells me:
"the process by which 'colored people' (which in US English has historically referred only to black people) became 'people of color' is through a retranslation from the French gens de couleur, at a time when the writings of Frantz Fanon et al. were popular." This is interesting.
So is the fact that Jesse Sheidlower tells me the Oxford English
Dictionary people have found a use of the phrase from as early
as 1781.
But of course these facts do not alter my aesthetic dispreference at all. That's what aesthetic dispreferences tend to be like.]

Even with adjectives of the form X-ored
where X is a noun stem, it doesn't work: a person who is censored
is not a person of censor; a person who is visored is not a person of
visor; a person who is monitored is not a person of monitor; a person who
is sponsored is not a person of sponsor.

This argument from failure of pattern is not adequate to say that there
is really something wrong with person of color. There are, of
course, such things as entirely idiosyncratic one-off constructions.
But it really doesn't matter, because my confession is not that I have
discerned a syntactic failing; it is simply that I hate the phrase.
It irritates me.

So let me now stop with the whining and make the spinoff point about
this confession (I did say at the start that there would be one, and
there is).

I do not believe that there is anything wrong with having personal
dislikes here and there, whether in the linguistic sphere or in fashion
or in any other domain. I have them too. When we argue against
prescriptive grammar here on Language Log, we are not saying people
shouldn't have strong likes or dislikes on matters of English usage. We
are saying those likes and dislikes should not be confused with objective
facts of correctness, and they should not be taught to schoolchildren as
if they were facts.

When I say that the phrase person of color just irks me, and
I refuse to use it, that's a fact about me. It's like the fact that
I will never (I hereby pledge) write an academic paper with "revisited" (or
its Latin verson "redux") or "whither" in the title, or write a blues
song that begins with the words "Woke up this morning".

So when I say of the phrase people of color that I dislike it,
I'm not saying anything about what is linguistically wrong. I'm
not going to publish a usage book in which I assert that person of
color is a vulgar error and not good English and you shouldn't use
it, because none of those things are true. You can use it all you want,
and you're right to do so.. I'm just saying it annoys me and I won't say
it. See the difference?

Because if you can, then obnoxiously opinionated compendiums of
subjective edicts like Strunk & White's The Elements of Style
will not do you as much harm as they do to the millions of poor abused
Americans who believe those edicts spring from something real and
important — something independent of some ill-tempered individual's
personal preferences. Although I will sometimes (because of my academic
specialism in English) have something factual to explain to you that you
might do well to listen to, you don't have to follow me in any of my
personal or aesthetic preferences. And you don't have to follow the
dotty old Will Strunk or the hypocritically grouchy E. B. White
in their unreasoned preferences either.

To apply this to a
particular recent case: if you hate the phrase
"less than three years", then don't use it. Use "fewer than three years"
instead if you like. Don't try to tell other people the former is
"wrong", because that's not true. Just avoid it yourself if you dislike
it. That's all.